I refuse to believe that I'm beyond help—and that's how I see mental illness. In truth, I'm not beyond help. But there also isn't a cure. And I don't want to believe that. I want to believe that if I do it right, if I do what they say, if I take the medication and don't drink, the madness will never bother me again. It will get tired of waiting around for an opportunity. It will go away.
When I wake up in the night drenched in sweat, dreaming of the old place, the reeling sun and neon lights, the leering people, the parties, the cop cars, the disappearing friends, and I fear that I've gone mad again, I get out of bed and move through the house like a thief, touching things, tapping the walls, until I am certain that I am here, that it's now, that I'm safe.
It's the end of the summer, and the world has come into focus. The blurred edges of things have sharpened. I take on solidity. I go down to the crawlspace under the house. Madness has vacated the premises. I know, now, that I am well. Lentz is wrong. The madness will never come again. I know it as surely as I know I am real.
Jeff
Fall 2001
Every evening, I go to my twelve-step meeting and mumble my name as we go around in a circle. While I sit in my little group, I rack my brain for something to say, but nothing comes. I think I will shatter if I speak. There will be pieces of me everywhere. I sit with my arms wrapped around my knees. I do this for three months. Then, one day, I say something, and everyone stares at me in shock, as if they hadn't been sure I could actually talk.
Fall comes. I brace myself for the blues, but the days pass and they don't come. The meds are working. I'm sober. I'm going to be fine.
One evening, I watch a man from my meeting lie on the ground, staring up at the red and yellow leaves on the trees.
"I'm in a world of hurt," he says to the sky.
I fall in love with him with a thud. Not because he's in a world of hurt, but because he's lifted his face from the ground and caught me looking at him, and smiled. Because his face is kind. I look away, and look back. He's still looking at me. He sits up. "But I'm all right," he says "This will pass."
I'm in no shape to be in love. It's a terrible idea. I'm already engaged, for God's sake, and less than six months sober—the usual suggestion is that you stay out of relationships for a year. But for some reason, in whatever haphazard fashion, it works.
I break off the absurd engagement to the bar guy and move into an apartment by myself. It's not lost on me that the one-room studio is half the size of my one-time living room back in California. Gone are my silk curtains and my velvet couch and four-poster bed. Gone are the fancy job and the limitless credit cards. My room contains a mattress, a desk, and a chair. I eat with my plate on my knees, sitting on the edge of the bed. I write, the novel now starting to take shape as I finally have the discipline and clarity to work on it every day and the focus to write well. And I start seeing this man.
His name is Jeff. His wife just left him and his mother just died. He's been diagnosed with depression, and his meds aren't working yet. He's a complete disaster area. I walk around his house in wonder. There is a dining room table, but no chairs. Dust covers every surface, an inch thick. There is no food in the refrigerator. Every room in his house is painted a different, hideous color, the doing of his ex-wife, who apparently liked to paint. The basement is packed full of dozens of boxes of useless things, jars and shot glasses with obscure logos and coffee cups and crock pots and ugly vases, the shelves on which the boxes sit sagging and covered with mold. It's the house of someone who hasn't been out of bed for months. In fits of energy, he has bought himself two midlife-crisis cars, three deluxe mattresses, and a set of copper pots and pans. He's trying to buy enough things to stave off the stifling depression he's under. It isn't working.
I stand in the doorway to his bedroom. He's in his suit, all the way under the covers, including his head. His dress shoes peek out. It's three o'clock in the afternoon.
"Hi," I say. The room is painted insane asylum green.
"Hi," comes a muffled voice.
"How was your day?"
"Not good," he says.
"Sorry to hear it." I lean against the door frame and jingle my keys. "Do you want to come out of there?"
"I'm being a walnut," he says. He sticks his nose out of the covers. "You could come get in."
"No thanks. I think you should get up and at least change your clothes. If you're going to be depressed, you shouldn't be wearing a suit. You should be in your pajamas."
This gets a muffled half laugh.
"Do you want me to go away?" I ask.
"No!"
"Then I'm going to make something to eat. And then you're getting out of bed and eating it. And then you can get back in bed if you want, but I'm going home."
"Don't go home!"
"If you don't get out of bed when I make dinner, I'm going home." I turn around and pick my way through the rubble and go into the kitchen and unpack the groceries I've brought.
A minute later he's standing in the doorway, his hair standing on end and his tie askew. He's taken off the shoes. "I'm out of bed," he says.
"Good. Chop carrots," I say.
"Now will you stay?" He sounds so small I want to fold him up and put him in a little box and keep him in my pocket.
"Sure," I say, and hand him a cutting board and a knife. Bewildered, he looks at them. "Carrots," I repeat.
"Oh," he says. "Right."
I have never been the sane one before. It is so nice I don't mind that he's in his own kind of madness. I know mad. I can handle mad. It's just a matter of feeding the mad thing, and getting it out of bed, and opening the curtains and letting in the light, and you do it over and over until the madness fades into the background and the person emerges again.
And since I seem so sane compared with how I've been all my life, I begin to believe I am. I do tell him I have bipolar, and jokingly say that he might want to think twice about getting involved with me. In fact, I give him a list of a hundred and one reasons not to date me, and bipolar is at the top of the list. I feel like I'm poisonous. So I give him my disclaimer, and hope for the best. But I also tell him it's all in the past.
He takes a leave of absence from work, and we fly to Florida for a month. We've been dating only a few months, and everyone thinks we're completely nuts. Lentz worries that it's yet another of my impulsive acts, a debacle waiting to happen. But it isn't.
In Florida, Jeff lies on the couch most of the time. I cook and write until he staggers up and needs to be fed. When he starts feeling better, we start going for drives. Soon, he's laughing, and I begin to find out who he is.
He's the kind of man who wouldn't have come near me with a ten-foot pole even a year ago. He has no time for flashy scenes. He wears green wool sweaters and sensible brown boots. There is no other word for him than kind. He's exactly who he says he is. He fascinates me. I watch him while he sleeps, wanting to take him apart and see how he's made. He snores like a freight train. He is tangible, solid. He holds down the bed. With him here, the roof isn't always flying off. With him here, needing my presence, I understand for the first time what it means to be good to someone. It's the first time I have ever been unselfish in my life. He needs something I have, so I give it to him.
Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love. We tumble into a life together just like that. We go from starry-eyed to angry to companionable in the space of a few weeks. In February, we go back to Minneapolis. His depression has lifted. In April, we buy an old Victorian near one of the city lakes. One Sunday, we're sitting at breakfast and decide to get married. So we do.
The Good Life
Summer 2002
It's been a year since I got sober, more than a year since the madness. I have taken on shape and weight. I am visible. When I walk, my feet make a sound. I am twenty-eight years old and married. The man I have married is real, and he laughs easily and often, and he is so big that at night he makes a dent
in the center of the bed and I roll into it and get squashed under him. I no longer float up and hover by the ceiling. I will stay. I whisper to myself, Stay, stay, stay.
I open my eyes. I look through the window at the whitewashed, pale blue sky of early morning. The kind of light, like dusk, where you can hardly see another person. It is only a dark figure, its face obscured, shadowy and ethereal. The figure ties his tie. He thinks I am asleep. I watch him, an inky blot against the pale, thin dawn light. It's like spying. I am secret, here in my bed, the dogs curled and warm at my belly, snoozing. They have no interest in morning. Jeff turns, and I close my eyes. I breathe slowly, pretending to sleep. He bends over me and kisses my cheek lightly, so he won't wake me. He opens the bedroom door and closes it carefully. It clicks shut. Then silence pours into the empty room, like water filling a vase. The vase holds roses, their heads bent, dying a little. They, too, are only a dark stain on the light. The silence pours in like the tide filling in a tide pool. It pours in like blood, seeping thick and heavy—
Oh, for God's sake, knock it off.
But it's lovely, says the madness, protesting—
No. This morning is perfect. The white light, coming up now, is perfect. This morning I am well. Wait—I double-check. I feel around me in the bed. The dogs, under the covers, stir, then settle in again. One of them snores a quilt-muffled snore. I smile. The leaves outside the window are thick and green, and the dark, delicate branches touch and tap, like fingers, against the glass, against the light. The early light is so lovely I almost hold my breath. This morning is perfect. I am sane.
I kick back in the chair in Dr. Lentz's office, telling him how wonderful everything is.
"My life is perfect," I say. "It's incredible. Everything's different now. The writing's going well, Jeff is good, my friends are good, my family's great. I feel incredible. I'm totally alive. I'm crazy busy. We have people over all the time. The summer is wonderful. I'm happier than I've ever been."
"You're not doing too much?" he asks.
"Of course not." I sigh, rolling my eyes. "Everything is perfect. Just right."
He smiles, shaking his head. "I have to say, it sounds pretty good."
"It is. It absolutely is," I say. I lean forward in my seat. "It's nothing like it used to be. That's ancient history. I've turned over a new leaf. I'm a totally different person." I laugh, delighted. "I'm not crazy anymore."
He scribbles something on his little pad. "I think, honestly, that your bipolar is in remission."
"You mean I'm well."
He smiles. "I mean you're in remission."
Same thing.
I throw my purse over my shoulder and stride out the door into the perfect, sunny summer day.
Jeff swings me around when he comes home. I am wearing an apron, laughing, and Jeff is kissing me. We are in a movie, a movie of normal people. It's a boring movie. No one will want to watch it but us, but we watch it, amazed.
"Peanut!" he cries, setting me down. "How was your day?"
I dance around the kitchen with my spatula and tell him. My day was perfect. I did everything right. I wrote a new chapter. I did laundry and folded it and put it away. I got the mail and paid the bills. I went to the store and came home and carried the groceries up all by myself. I had coffee with a friend, and the Johnsons are coming for dinner, we're having pasta, and salad, and I made bread and I bought five kinds of cheese, and olives, and for dessert a blueberry lemon tart. The crust is from scratch. The pasta is homemade. I made three kinds of sauce so people can choose.
I forget what it's like to be mad, a blissful sort of amnesia. This is the nature of bipolar: when the episodes end, it's back to the regular world, and the regular world looks like heaven, and you relish your sanity. How could this be just remission? Lentz is wrong. My mood has leveled out. My family is breathing a little easier. Jeff seems to be the rock that will keep me grounded for good. He treats me like a queen, a miracle, and for the first time I am loved not for the constant excitement, the insane passion that always drew men in and then, of course, pushed them away, not for how I look or what I do, but for who I am, quirks and strangeness and flaws and all. In the circle of his love, I can finally relax, breathe easy, love him back with everything I've got. And for the first time, I have something to give.
I relish the small tasks and the chores and the hours I spend writing in my office. I sometimes just walk around the house, a little disoriented, trying to grasp the fact that I live here, that all the pretty things are mine. I close my eyes and open them and everything is still there. The days tumble over each other, sunlit and gorgeous, drenched in things that are real. I find myself making plans—for the evening, for the fall, for the coming year, for my life. I've never been able to do that before—the madness always intervened.
Sometimes, I get the uneasy feeling that I'm fooling everyone. In the middle of a gathering of friends, at a party, at a show, on a walk with Jeff, I'll remember the past. It leaves me a little shaken, bewildered by how I've gotten from there to here. I feel it in the pit of my stomach, the shame of it, the feeling that I am getting away with something, living a life I don't deserve. It's someone else's life. I've snuck in and am squatting in it. I'm wearing someone else's wedding ring, occupying someone else's house, and everyone loves the woman I'm pretending to be, not me. Who would love me? I hate the person I was. She disgusts me, her and her mess and her madness, her garish excess, her disorderly excuse for a life. She was a monster. She was sick. Suddenly I can feel her in me, like bile in my throat. I can't let her out. The spell will break, and she will take over again. I want to forget her. I want her dead.
Then the feeling passes. I believe in this new world with a religious fervor. It is my savior. If I am very good, they'll let me stay, and soon, if I work hard enough, I will belong.
I decide I should get a job. I have all this boundless energy, energy to spare. Finishing a novel isn't enough. I'll work full-time, keep writing, and still have time left over to live my overflowing life.
The Magazine
November 2002
I'm at a celebration for the opening of a new section of Minneapolis's city magazine. I had my first job in journalism here years ago and, hired again, have thrown myself into the creation of an arts and entertainment section. I thought it up, pitched it, designed it, hired the freelancers, wrote the features, and edited the thing. The people at the magazine have gone nuts. There are notepads with my name on them, radio ads about my section, the publisher keeps taking me out to lunch—my job is to grab a younger readership for stories on the Minneapolis arts scene, revamp the magazine's image, and make the publishers money in the process. Horrified by the notepads and ads, I'm trying not to think about what I'm suddenly supposed to be. I just brace myself and go galloping into my job.
There are people everywhere, laughing and drinking white wine. People I've never met come up to congratulate me. I'm a little overwhelmed, so I keep smiling, figuring it can't hurt. My editor pushes me forward to say something. I have no idea what comes out of my mouth. I have no idea how I wound up here. I say something that is apparently coherent, and now people are clapping. It dawns on me that they think I am a real person. And now that I think of it, I look like a real person. I see myself through their eyes: I am dressed in real-person clothes. I have a real-person job. I drove here in a car that I own. I drove here from a house that I own, which also contains my husband; not only do I have a husband, I realize, but I have a second husband. Julian's a lifetime away, our divorce came and went with little fuss. The wild years are over. I'm sober, I'm not crazy anymore, and here I am, a new person with a real life at last.
I look around myself in alarm. There are the photographers. There are the ladies who lunch. There are the wealthy patrons of the arts, the hip gallery people, the mayor, the music people in black. There has been a grave mistake. Someone let me in.
So I'd better have fun while it lasts.
I'm a whirlwind of activity. I make phone call
s, assign stories, juggle meetings, edit, interview, and write and write. I'm going to succeed if it kills me. Any success I've had before this doesn't count. This is different. I'm going to show them all.
I sit in the morning meetings, brainstorming stories, trying to believe I am one of them, trying to pass. Their voices are level; I try to keep my voice level. They do not get worked up; I won't get worked up either. They are respectable people. Very Minnesotan, very mild, very nice. I glue myself to the chair, do not wiggle or hop. I amuse them with my interruptions and ideas and cackling laugh. But they see me, they like what I'm doing, so I belong. I am officially a person at last.
"I'll take it," I say, scribbling in my notebook. I look up at my editor, who's standing in front of the dry-erase board in the meeting room. "I'll take the story."
"But you took the last one."
"I'll take this one too. I have plenty of time."
"You're editing a section by yourself."
"It's a light month." I swallow my coffee and poke at my bagel with my pen. "I really want to do it." I jiggle my knee under the table, wishing this meeting would move along.
The editor laughs. "All right," he says. The other editors look at me a little strangely. There seems to be a concerted effort at this magazine to move as slowly as possible. I am a little bit resented for my incessant work. People keep telling me to slow down.
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